Rave Reports Visual Designer

Anchor - Editor

Normally, report bands / columns / paragraphs are justified to the Left and Top of a design area. This will be fine for the majority of reporting needs. However, have you ever wanted to control the starting or ending position of your report components dynamically? This could be a two column section, where the left column is a memo component which changes in height and the right column is a text component which is always a one line item. How do you make both components "float" and align to the bottom of the design block? In Rave that is done with the Anchor property.

To change the anchor style you go to the Anchor property of the desired component and click on the ellipse symbol, it will open the Anchor editor like the one shown above. This provides a method to select the anchor style you want for that component by using the appropriate vertical and horizontal radio button. Note that a representation appears below each anchor selection to give you a visual indication of what that setting is designed to accomplish. The last three settings, Stretch, Resize, Spread are a little difficult to explain but if you watch the sample you will get a picture showing the differences between them.

An important point about the Anchor property settings is that they are relative to that components parent. So if the parent is a page then the settings are relative to the page margins. If the parent is a section then the settings are relative to the section borders. One way to visually see the parentage is to examine the component(s) on the Report Node in question in the Project Tree Panel. Go up one level and that is the parent.

You certainly are not restricted to the following combinations, but normally the anchor settings will be paired as follows:

ExpandParent, Waste Fit

Editors:

Band Style, DataText, Fonts, Line